Chassis Battery Charging

[davidbrady]

Hi Chuck,

I'm trying to recall the converters out there that use 12VDC inverters. The big guys (Marathon, Parliament, Liberty, Millennium, Vantare) all use 24VDC inverters and most likely the Trace SW pure sinewave series. My Vantare uses the SW4024 and I think your Marathon does too. This means we have a 24V house battery bank that can be used to jump the S60 in the event of dead chassis batteries. My Vantare has a button on the dash to momentarily connect the house to chassis batteries. I also have a 24V Guest charger which is available to charge the chassis batteries. The Guest charger is plugged into a 120VAC house receptacle that's relay controlled by the ignition key. When the key is off the Guest 120VAC receptacle gets power, but only if I don't have that particular load pruned. I'd look again, but I'm pretty sure you should have a 24VDC house system that should be able to jump the chassis batteries. You should definitely wire in a 24V chassis battery charger. Guest makes on as does Xantrex and there are others.

I have to say, I think BB dropped the ball with it's perpetual use of a 12VDC chassis system. It wasn't until the M450 that they went with the long industry standard of 24V and long overdue. How many folks have chased 12V cannon connector gremlins because of the excessive current draw on the pins, in many cases the amperage draw exceeds the rating of the connector. No such issues with our 24V chassis systems.

Also the BB approach in the LXi of requiring the aux batt switch to be enabled to allow chassis battery charging could be better. How many have left the switch enabled, detached from shore power, and found that both chassis and house batteries banks were depleted. BB tried an improvement with the M450 Big Bird relay but even that didn't go far enough. What's really need is a BlueSea Charging Relay which smartly combines battery banks when one or the other is charging and separates them during discharge.

The Prevost converter approach has always been a well defined separation between house and chassis systems to eliminate finger pointing; hence, the converters reluctance to install smart systems like the BlueSea charging relay. My Vantare gives me a complete separation of systems with a house wall outlet to plug a 24V chassis charger in to. There's no chance of the house depleting the chassis bank nor of the chassis bank depleting the house, but there is a receptacle for a chassis charger and there is a momentary switch on the dash to jump start the engine.